January 19, 2022
Various and Sundry
Upgrading to Big Sur seems to have completely broken all my image editing software and animation programs. I can't meme.
Art by Volker Maunz
Via Pete comes sad news regarding the state of the Japanese wooden weapons craft.
Speaking of which, Japan has re-instated their COVID-induced ban on foreigners entering the country. Like Australia, they seem to be reconnecting with their roots.
All that money that companies are spending to develop self-driving trucks so they can do away with truckers may not actually be worth it. (Via Isegoria)
The last post at Declination and today's post at Z-Blog both deal with the thorny problem of our current crisis in trust, and difficulty in finding truth when the gatekeepers of Palo Alto are so powerful. Give them both a read.
After a period of self-reflection, I am relieved to discover that I was not the only person recommended a tactical cat harness.
Over at Zoopraxiscope, Don has found the quote of the year.
If you ever wondered what you would have done in 1930s Germany, you’re doing it right now.
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January 18, 2022
2022: 'Year of the Tiger' A Year From the Far Future of our Youth Is Here Now
...and it looks a lot like 1962.
Note that 1962 was a 'Year of the Tiger' as well, which, by the convoluted special pleading of astrology means that there are two tigers involved...which should give one pause...
...or paws.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Actually, astrology is complete bollocks, and we apologize for indulging it, but it gives us an excellent opportunity to make light of a potentially serious situation by posting cheesecake, for which we are are completely unrepentant.
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January 17, 2022
Meanwhile, In, Over, and Hundreds of Miles Around Tonga (Updated)
Tonga blew up!
Internet to Tonga is down and there is very little communication right now with the island kingdom.
The damage is extensive and extends to nearby islands.
UPDATE:
Via Don: The Vulcanologists over at Volcano Cafe have an assessment. It looks like two of the Kingdom's Islands are completely gone. Ash is playing havoc with communications. It was, apparently, a VEI-5 on the Volcano Eruption Scale. Meanwhile, as the first deaths are reported, Australia and New Zealand are sending reconnaissance planes to assess how best to get aid to the islands, which is not as straightforward as it sounds since the volcano is still erupting and the ash is a menace to turbine powered planes.
Some idea of the scale of the eruption can be gleaned from the fact that, while Tonga is in the South Pacific, the eruption was heard in Alasksa.
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Mike Lindell Has been De-Banked
Lindell had his phone records subpoenaed by the January 6 committee.
This is really dangerous ground we are on.
If someone who has committed no crime, who merely has unpopular political opinions, can loose their BANKING privileges, over the fear that the bank might be associated with him in the current climate, then we are approaching Stassi territory.
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A Scary Story
Dr. Mauser brings us a story about a newly hatched engineer trying to pass the time.
Because it is current year, things go off the rails after a bit.
I urge you to read the whole thing.
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Y'all Hear About Them Thar Train Robberies Out West?
Ah' read bout 'em in a dime novel once.
Golly willakers.
2022 is not turning out as I'd hoped.
A plague of train robberies in California are becoming such an issue that they are having a nationwide impact particularly on COVID test kits. What's damning is that the BBC notes in the video above that the robberies are up 100% in the last month...50% of what they're experiencing would still be astonishing.
Union Pacific Railroad is now fed-up enough that it's considering the logistics of avoiding Los Angeles altogether.
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Oh. Wow.
One of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes brings us news from the vicinity of Boyajian's Star or KIC-8462852.
"Hi aliens!"
For those who haven't heard about this star, it has been in the news for a couple of years, because of some anomalous dimming. The dimming was initially thought to be indicative of large 'objects' that weren't really shaped like planets orbiting the star. This caused....excitement....in certain circles. There was (and still is) some loose and irresponsible talk of "alien megastructures". However, subsequent observation indicated that the structures might be composed of dust...very fine dust with about the same particle size as cigaret smoke. So comets or a solar ring system were proposed, and, in any event it looked like it was probably soon to be figured out.
Now, 12 years after first baffling astronomers, there are a few theories, but nothing really fits. For one thing, if it IS dust something is replacing it at uneven intervals, leading to loose and irresponsible speculation that the dimming is caused by tailings from asteroid mining or something.
Current investigations are focused on trying to find some odd periodic collision of comets.
One scientist by the name of Dr. Edward G. Schmidt decided to look for other stars that were behaving in a similar way. No other's had been noted but no one had been looking for them. If it's happening in multiple systems, it probably is natural, and by observing multiple such stars, it might be possible to find a cause.
However...
A search of the entire sky turned up only a few. They are ALL clustered in the vicinity of Boyajian's Star and only around stars of the same stellar type, namely G and F stars. Like Earth's sun, or slightly hotter.
This is EXACTLY what one would expect if the phenomenon were the result of alien megastructures or megaprojects that were associated with a civilization that was expanding to nearby systems...and if they were only choosing to do big projects around sunlike stars. Bigger and smaller stars tend to have flares or other problems so G and F stars would make sense in that context.
Of course it still could be a natural phenomenon that only affects a particular type of star in that little bit of the galaxy.
Explaining that would probably be a cosmological discovery of considerable note.
Scientists really don't know what this is.
But it's intriguing that the discovery of other examples actually strengthened rather than debunked the "It's aliens!" hypothesis.
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2020 #2
Banality is below fold....Oh look. Pretty scenery.
Art by 行之LV. Check out her Weibo channel.
more...
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January 14, 2022
It's Been a Week
I finally received the phone call I've been dreading since January 2020.
My 80 year old parents have COVID.
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January 09, 2022
Civics Lesson
Georgia Congresscritter, Marjorie Taylor Greene has a reputation for being a bit of a whackaloon. Depending on your worldview and what dictionary you are using, the rep of the Rep is richly deserved.
However...
To her credit, she went on Tim Pool's podcast, the only sitting member of congress to have done so. Tim's panel consists of passionate lefties, libertarians, and anarchists, and they pull no punches so it's rare for an actual politician to submit themselves to this.
WHATEVER your opinion of Rep. Green, you really need to watch her description of how the votes are actually done. It's kind of terrifying.
Oh yeah...Ian's a total nutbar.
At 1:13 she describes what is involved in a recorded vote, how she managed piss off everybody in the House, and how she was able to at least stop bad things from passing. Your mileage may vary, but I'm glad theres at least one crazy lunatic in the house.
In other Tim Pool news...
One more day and MTG could have been there for the S.W.A.T.ing.
Yes Tim Pool got S.W.A.T.ed, the next day. Interestingly, the panel was interviewing a cop at the time, who clarified the legal position of the Police.
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January 08, 2022
Foreshadowing
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January 05, 2022
In Lieu of Content
I'm going out of town for a few days to see the folks. Internet access will be diffident at best, so here are a collection of random video links.
Thus we have met our federally mandated requirements for educational content.
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One of My Senators Eats a Red Pill
In all seriousness, this is a bad situation, I expect the death toll will be non-zero, what with snow covering up tailpipes and people now running out of gas. Senator Kain's been doing a good job of bringing attention to this, and, to his credit, did not get himself helicoptered out as would be easy for a U.S. senator to do, but would have hampered relief efforts.
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January 04, 2022
What's Happening?
Well, The Taliban is ordering all shop owners to behead all of their mannequins. What? As practice?
The President has finally decided to go after them thar Robber Barons we do hear tell about....well some of the Robber Barons...well...he's taking on 'BIG MEAT'. (Buy and freeze your steaks now kids....there are bugs and tofu in our future)
The Arlington Education Association, the local teachers union, which, shockingly, represents teachers, but not just any teachers, teachers that teach kids how to read and write. This latter, somewhat redundant point, becomes relevant only because this organization that represents teachers, sent out this letter to parents...one of whom was the kind of saucy bitch who had actually taken a grammar class at some point...
...presumably a grammar class taught by different teachers.
This a few days old but I'd held out some hope that it was a misunderstanding. NYC is assigning COVID treatments based on race. (The problem with holding out hope is that it is more likely to get blown out of your hand.)
Yesterday, Virginia was hit by a blizzard...or as Pete and Wonderduck might describe it, " a Monday". This deposit of 1-300cm of powdery ice 1h would not merit any comment but for the thousands of people who have been trapped in their cars in subfreezing temperatures for 24 hours or more. Most probably aren't dressed for the weather as it was warm shirt-sleeve weather for the last few days, right up until the storm hit.
Typhoon Rai, which clobbered the Phillippines last week, is now thought to have left over half a million homeless.
Art by Bee Sang
Guess what? Our old friend Coronachan, the gift that keeps on giving, has gifted us some more. A NEW variant has been found in Camaroon. Cue panic.
I'm thinking that most of us feel the same way about the year of the Tiger that Mayoi Hitsugi does...
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January 03, 2022
Meanwhile: North of the Black Sea
I don't think people are fully appreciating how serious this Ukraine mess is getting.
Russia has been massing troops on the Russian and Belarusian borders of Ukraine for a few weeks and is currently running fallout drills, establishing national protocols for burying mass numbers of people and informing the public of new excavation standards for mass graves that will be containing radioactive corpses. In an effort to establish a dialog and clarify matters, the Russian government is likening current events to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On the other side of the equation, The U.S.A., France, Germany, and the U.K. have re-affirmed their support for the Ukraines independence and territorial integrity. This is a long-standing agreement going back to the Budapest Accords of the early 90s that convinced Ukraine to give up it's nuclear weapons, which it had inherited from the breakup of the U.S.S.R.
Russia is on balance, obviously in the wrong here, but Ukraine, while it has done nothing to warrant the egregious violations of its sovereignty that it has endured, IS a corrupt country that literally has NAZIs sitting in it's parliament.
This is a mess and I don't think anybody is fully appreciating the resolve of the other.
Ukraine is the heartland of Russian civilization and culture, which began with the Russ of Kiev. Russians, especially nationalists like Putin have an intense attachment to Ukraine. On the Ukrainian side, that bridge was burnt, with prejudice, by the Holodomor. So terrible were the Russian depredations of the Ukrainians that the Ukrainians in WW2 welcomed the fricking NAZIs in as liberators...it was so bad in the Ukraine that the NAZIs were a step up. This is why there are still NAZIs in Ukrainian politics.
The Russians have a huge amount to gain by an adventure in the Ukraine. Oil, a strategic buffer zone, the richest soil in the world and prestige foreign and domestic as well as the strong psychological need to reintegrate what they see as their prodigal brethren. They have taken the measure of the U.S. in the aftermath of the Afghanistan debacle and seem to have decided that there is no better time to do this, as they will NEVER have such diffident leadership in the US again.
Furthermore, Putin's position may not be as secure as is generally supposed. He is an autocrat who is ultimately answerable to the Russian Oligarchs and his position is dependent on appearing strong, both to them and the Russian people.
For its part, the U.S. in particular, after the Afganistan fiasco, feels it cannot back down again. Democrat talk a good game of being anti-war when not in office, but the only Democratic presidents that are not considered mediocre or outright failures are those that waged wars. They have a history of using the immense powers conferred on the government by war to consolidate their power by rounding up their political opposition and the only time this backfired on them meaningfully was in the aftermath of World War One. Plagued by multiple calamities, most of which are the products of their own ineptitude, the current administration needs a foreign policy victory, or, perhaps a short, victorious war. They see Russia as a broke corrupt nation that is a husk of its former self with a military that NATO even in its current military state could take in a conventional war. That assessment is not, strictly speaking, wrong, but the Russians most likely have some nasty surprises in store nevertheless. In any event the Russians, who have a vast tactical nuclear arsenal have made it clear that any intervention by western powers past the eastern border of Poland will be met with nuclear fires.
The U.S. and other Western powers seem to have dismissed tactical nukes as a real thing since about 1992. While Strategic forces of the U.S. and Russia, are basically at parity, The Russians have a vast advantage in low yield, short range weapons intended for battlefield use. All those points about Russia being a declining power mean that the equalizing effect of tactical nukes is very tempting, and indeed the Russians have made no secret of their willingness to use weapons in a battlefield situation to "calm things down".
The current administration, so heavy with theoreticians and academics likely can't really get their heads around this as a real thing. If the Russians pop a nuke and evaporate a number of NATO troops the reaction is not likely to be measured. Even if President Biden is removed by the 25th amendment, the Vice President is a quite incompetent courtesan who exhibits all the most toxic girl-boss behaviors of a particularly entitled upper middle-class debutante.
In any event, there are few things more dangerous than scared, insecure leaders who are backed into a corner, and whose political future depends on appearing tough.
Also: The Budapest Accords are a linchpin of nuclear nonproliferation. Ukraine gave up its nukes with the guarantee that it did not need them anymore. It has come to rue that decision. Other countries with nuclear capability, but no nuclear weapons are watching this situation closely. The EU and other NATO members, particularly France, (which, despite their reputation post WW2 are a world power that takes international norms VERY seriously) may well see the Budapest Accords as THE line in the sand, for if that commitment is abandoned, then Western (not just US) promises and guarantees will carry NO weight and for many countries in 'dangerous neighborhoods', not having high energy weapons will seem foolish.
The point is that the Russians can quite possibly push too far, underestimating what the west sees as being the true states, and the west is likely to not recognize the seriousness of the Russian resolve and willingness to 'go to the next level'.
I have a degree in History, but foreign policy is outside my bailiwick.
Thus, I have some questions going forward:
How binding ARE the Budapest Accords?
What is the press coverage and public attitude towards this mess REALLY like in Russia. I don't speak Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian nor do I read Cyrillic so I'm taking the word of western news outlets, which is rarely a path to wisdom.
How many "advisors" does the U.S. and other NATO countries have in the Ukraine?
It seems consequential that the FINNISH politicians of all people are talking about joining NATO. How serious IS this talk, is it just smack talk or are the Finns seriously contemplating abandoning their position of neutrality that has existed since 1945?
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Meanwhile: On Twitch
A while back, Moriko, an ESL streamer best known as the completely apolitical fruit-bat from Bat at Video Games had a bunch of people get together a bit ago to stage an intervention on her internet jargon .
*****************
Pickamee's on Twitch now! Steam burns are imminent.
This may have worrying implications for certain IRL Twitch streamers.
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January 02, 2022
The New Year
...was starting off with a decidedly unwelcome continuation of trends from 2021..... what with the area around Boulder County Colorado somehow burning down...during a blizzard.
However, now that we enter day two of 2020-Two, there is some hope that things might be turning around.
Wonderduck is, it seems, alive!
He's still in the hospital, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Go welcome him back in the comments please!
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I Haven't Seen a Lot About This...
...but it looks to be really bad in Colorado right now.
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January 01, 2022
It's 2022
At least here on the Eastern Seaboard of North America
Art by Nardack
more...
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December 31, 2021
2021: Year in Review
2020 won.
Violence in the streets, America in ignominious retreat on the international stage, shortages, inflation, and me learning to talk, use a fork, and tie my shoes.
It was just the 1970's but all in one year.
But no disco.
I'm completely done with this foetid abortion of a year, but Pixy has gone into rather more detail, while looking at the year from a tech perspective.
He also has disco.
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